


Pastel Flowers

by realityshmality



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-19
Updated: 2013-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-15 11:24:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/848985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/realityshmality/pseuds/realityshmality
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He used to play the piano; it was a way to give his buzzing fingers a purposeful movement. He didn’t quite fall in love with the piano, but he enjoyed it as any child enjoys what their parent’s loved, and it meant he spent more time with his mom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pastel Flowers

He used to play the piano; it was a way to give his buzzing fingers a purposeful movement. He didn’t quite fall in love with the piano, but he enjoyed it as any child enjoys what their parent’s loved, and it meant he spent more time with his mom. She became busy with lessons when he was old enough to walk, even picking up some music classes to teach in the district’s middle schools. Through going to work with his mom, and picking rides up in his dad’s cruiser, Stiles learned the layout of his town faster than most kids his age. He may not have known how to read going into kindergarten, but he knew where every firehouse and middle school was in Beacon Hills.

He associated different sounds with locations. The middle schools always sounded blocky, stilted, notes hammered out rough by learning fingers. Schools still feel that way sometimes to him, always catching him by surprise when it does.

The private lessons his mom taught gave the neighborhoods sounds too. The neighborhood in the east, farther from the woods sounded smooth, notes slurred together. To the middle of Beacon Hills there was a house with deep sharp staccato drops of sounds; it felt like the vibrations of hardwood under your feet when moving a piano.

There was a library that sat rumbling notes in his chest, and it was too much when he was younger that he sometimes rubs his chest when he visits now.

His mom made their home feel light. She played spring flowers from the black and white keys, filling the rooms up with a breeze carrying dandelion seeds. Her sounds were so light he felt he could breathe them right in.

She taught him how to play, and when his concentration wandered and he played what his fingers hit and not what the sheeted music said, she wouldn’t get mad, she’d smile instead and say that is what jazz is for, to play around. He’s seen her yell at students before, but she only did that when they abused the instrument. Stiles never did.

After the funeral neither he nor his father knew what to do with the strikingly quite piano in their living room. It was left alone for months until one day, when his father was driving home from school, his dad asked,

“Do you want to play anymore? I don’t hear you anymore.”

Stiles was surprised, looking down at his hands,

“I, its Mom’s. I miss playing with her.” His dad didn’t turn from the road, 

“I heard the teen center is looking for donations for a music program, and if you want it, the piano stays, I just. I just thought that maybe someone-“

“No, I don’t play. She’d want someone to play it.”

“Okay.” His father looked over at him, “okay.”

Three days later the piano was out of their living room and made the teen center sound like a barely controlled circus.

He hasn’t played regularly in years, but on occasion, bored out of his mind, or not even actively thinking about it, decidedly not thinking about it, at all. He’ll find that piano and try to make it sound like it had in their home, light as pastel flowers. He sometimes manages it.


End file.
